Americans don’t travel, right? Well, some do, and they need to make phone calls. In this Ask the Analyst, I try to help some people who want phones with global roaming capability.
John asks me, “I live in Okinawa, Japan, but travel routinely to the U.S. and Korea and other places (Thailand, Guam, Hawaii) infrequently. Is there a cell phone or mobile device to make calls economically at least from those places and in the future from anywhere in the world?”
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And more directly, but relatedly, Eugene asks, “BlackBerry 9650 and HTC Touch Pro 2: Of these two world phones that Sprint carries, which is the better all-around phone?”
Global Roaming: Uncommon, and Expensive
International roaming is a big deal, and pretty common, in Europe; in fact, the EU recently passed a law to stop wireless carriers from charging high roaming rates over there. But because so few Americans cross borders with their cell phones, it’s never really been a priority for U.S. carriers to provide affordable roaming. So other than some reasonably-priced plans for travel to Canada and Mexico, rates are generally high, often $1 or more per minute for voice and up to a shocking $20/MB for data.
T-Mobile recently said it’s considering new global plans with caps on monthly fees, but we haven’t seen the details yet.
Eugene’s question shows another problem many U.S. consumers have: if you want to roam beyond a very limited list of countries with a Sprint or Verizon phone, you have to choose from a very slim selection of combination CDMA/GSM technology phones. Sprint’s best bet right now is the BlackBerry 9650, because the HTC Touch Pro 2 runs on the old Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system that development has pretty much stopped for.
A SIMple Plan
Many U.S. phones can make costly calls overseas. AT&T and T-Mobile each have many world phones, and Verizon and Sprint each have a few. If you’re comfortable paying $1 or more per minute and you need to keep your U.S. number, that’s your best option. Call your carrier in advance to set up global roaming.
If you want to make cheap calls, you need an unlocked GSM phone that supports the 900 or 1800 Mhz 2G bands, or the 2100 Mhz 3G band. Your existing U.S.-based world phone can be unlocked on demand by calling your carrier, as long as you’ve owned it for a month or so. If you don’t own one already, our current Editors’ Choice is the Sony Ericsson Naite. (For more details, check out our feature, “Unlocked Cell Phones In The USA?”, and see below for a slideshow of some unlocked phones available in the U.S..)
Then you need to get a local SIM card in each country you travel to. Just go to a local cell-phone shop and buy a SIM. Most of the world understands the words “Prepaid SIM,” no matter what the local language is. The salesperson will usually help you set it up, at least for voice calling. That will give you a local phone number with the lowest rates, often as low as 10c/minute for local calls, and usually free incoming calls. There’s an excellent list of prepaid SIM options around the world at prepaidgsm.net.
Some companies, such as telestial.com and cellularabroad.com, sell multi-country SIMs (and even a National Geographic-branded phone), but their rates are much higher than local cards’. The National Geographic Travel Phone, for instance, charges around $1/minute for outgoing local calls in most countries. That’s better than roaming with a U.S. carrier, but still not something you’d want to chat on.
Data Doldrums
There’s also another big catch: very few of these prepaid solutions offer an easy way to get on the Internet. It’s almost always possible, but usually so complicated as to be essentially incomprehensible. If you don’t speak the language of the country you’re in, forget about understanding how to configure Web access on a prepaid account. I have been trying to do so for years, and failing every time.
So that leaves you with two options to get on the Net: seek out Wi-Fi hotspots, or use an XCom Global MiFi.
I’m very excited by XCom Global, which offers MiFi hotspots in 35 countries for $17.95/day. I’ll review the product next month when I go to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The XCom hotspot should offer Internet access to up to 5 devices, including Skype support. While $17.95/day doesn’t sound cheap, that’s for unlimited use – it really beats $5-20/megabyte, which is what U.S. carriers charge while roaming.
So What Should You Do?
John, the situation is a mess. There is no cheap, easy way to use a cell phone across the globe. Your best bet, sadly, is to use Skype in Wi-Fi hotspots, but that isn’t a real solution. Second-place would be to get local SIMs for each country you travel to frequently, and swap them into an unlocked GSM phone. Sound awkward? Welcome to international roaming.